SAP HANA migrations to Amazon Web Services (AWS) can be performed using multiple options, including backup and restore, export and import, and SAP HANA System Replication (HSR). The selection of a particular option depends on the network connectivity between source and target SAP HANA databases, the size of the source database, downtime considerations, and other factors.
The SAP HSR option for migrating SAP HANA workloads to AWS works well when there is a stable network between the source and target systems and the entire database (SAP HANA DB replication snapshot) can be completely replicated within 1 day, as stipulated by SAP for network throughput requirements for SAP HSR. The downtime requirements with this approach are limited to performing the takeover on the target AWS environment, SAP HANA DB backup, and post-migration tasks.
SAP HSR supports the use of different hostnames (hostnames mapped to different IP addresses) for replication traffic between the primary, or source, and secondary, or target, systems. You can do this by defining those specific sets of hostnames under the [system_replication_hostname_resolution] section in global.ini. In this section, all hosts of the primary and the secondary sites must be defined on each host. For detailed configuration steps, see the SAP documentation.
One key takeaway from this setup is that the hostnames in the primary system must be different from the hostnames in the secondary system. Otherwise, the following errors can be observed.
